In which I'm dismayed...

Well, this is just no good at all.

The news that North Korea has tested a nuclear bomb is, at some level, no surprise at all. But it's a startling reminder of how much more uncertain the world has become under six years of Bush's stewardship. Yet another harrowing failure to add to the long litany...

I did my honours thesis, way back in 2003 on North Korea's nuclear program, so don't get me wrong - North Korea was almost certainly already a nuclear power, and has been since the early nineties. But in those comforting days, they had only one or (at most) two bombs - not enough to test one, and certainly too few to put any on the open market. That they were actively seeking the means to make more became clear in 2002, when it became clear that Kim Jong Il was testing the limits of the porous restrictions he accepted from the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1994.

And in response to this news, Bush and his cabal neocon thugs did... nothing. They offered only rhetoric as Pyongyang acknowledged and then, with growing bellicosity, accelerated its nuclear programs. The DPRK took the wraps off its then-sealed plutonium production facilities and openly resumed the construction of new plants. The current best guess is that the bomb detonated today was built with plutonium from just those facilities - facilities that might still be decommissioned if the US had shown genuine global leadership. But instead Bush launched a war of choice against another backwards power that had no WMDs whatsoever, while comprehensively ignoring a grave strategic threat in North Korea.

Could this have been prevented? Maybe not - the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (I still chuckle at that name), more isolated and fearful than any state on Earth, had compelling strategic motives to seek nuclear weapons. It's possible that they might not have been dissuaded by any threats or temptations - perhaps not even the diplomatic recognition and security guarantees that they so desperately crave from the US. But what can reasonably ascertain is that the path Bush took - a toothless, provocative combination of belligerent rhetoric and diplomatic neglect - was the one formula absolutely guaranteed to facilitate Pyongyang's nuclear program.

Why does this matter so much? Isn't North Korea too isolated, too purposeless and frightened to ever use its bombs? Perhaps, but there are other consequences almost too nightmarish to contemplate. First and most ominous is that North Korea sells every thing it can get its hands on - rockets, nuclear technology, small arms, drugs, and so much more. The hundreds of millions of dollars that a nuclear weapon would fetch on the market will seem mighty tempting to one of the world's poorest countries - particularly as their new reactors at Taechon and Yongbyon come online, enabling North Korea to build dozens of nuclear bombs every year. And the DPRK is not known for its discretion in selecting customers - a terrorist group's money is just as good as, say, Iran's. Anybody think this is alaramist fantasy? Think again.

It's no less disturbing to think that this could provoke an arms race in East Asia. China's already armed to the teeth, but the governments Japan and even South Korea are certainly reappraising their non-nuclear status today. If you share my opinion that every new nuclear power results in a substantially more frightening world, then you'll be as distressed as I was by an unsettlingly middle-of-the-road assessment of how long it would take Japan to build its first nuclear bomb if it so choose. 48 hours. That's not even the lowest estimate.

This has also left the world without feasible strategic options for disarming North Korea. If Kim's paranoid regime has enough bombs to test one, then they surely have enough to build a credible strategic deterrent - at least half a dozen. Any military action against North Korea would surely be reciprocated with a fission explosion in Tokyo Harbour. The world's diplomatic leverage has been similarly neutered, consigning the North's long-suffering 23 million people to another eon of poverty and repression. And I'm dreading, without a touch of facetiousness, the not-far-off day that the Republicans begin to argue that a nuclear North Korea only demonstrates the need for airstrikes against Iran. We're going to be decades repairing the damage that the Republican Party has done to the world.


P.S. On the plus side, I've just taught my first class in Government and Politics - I'll write more about that tomorrow, by which time I should have stopped scowling at today's news.

P.P.S. This is a fine reference on North Korea's nukes.